Sacrificial Structures

Sacrificial StructuresWaste, Animals, and the Monumental Impulse Clint Wilson III (bio) Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone theyleave.... One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. —Henry David Thoreau For the most part, things never get built the way they're drawn. —Maya Lin In their construction as well as their symbolic power, monuments result in a fundamental proliferation of waste: the waste of resources, rights, and especially what Giorgio Agamben has called the "ontological waste" of being.1 Rarely is waste's inextricable, symbolic relation to ontology more apparent than in memorials designed to observe the sacrifice of animals, whose deaths raise multifarious questions for human political and aesthetic futures. Artistic representations of nonhumans have an admittedly long history, dating at least to zoolatrous cultures and Homeric ekphrasis; binding human warfare to pastoral imagery, for instance, the shield of Achilles features "a herd of straight-horned cattle" and a "meadow for white-fleeced sheep."2 In our era of factory farming and mass animal casualties, however, art that would normalize the expected and often-wasteful sacrifice of nonhuman others takes on new meanings. Indeed, these sacrificial structures bolster Zygmunt Bauman's sweeping claim that "waste is the dark, shameful secret of all production."3 Marshaling collective memory and articulating anthropocentric [End Page 86] assumptions, animal memorials warrant closer attention as texts that shape historical narrative and make manifest the prodigal logics of our monumental impulse. Monuments intending to honor animal death, especially death in the service of human warfare, risk paradoxically veiling nonhuman sacrifice. Redeploying James E. Young's remarks about the impulse to memorialize historical events, nonhuman war memorials "may actually spring from an opposite and equal desire to forget."4 In a related register, these objects lend physical form to the body politic's "immunization," a term that biopolitical thinker Roberto Esposito defines as "a kind of progressive interiorization of exteriority... [a] transformation from exterior complexity to a complexity that is internal to the system itself."5 Animals represent an exterior force tirelessly cast as a threat, or mere resource, for the internal health of human political and social order. In their tacit assent to the forced conscription of nonhumans, these monuments risk vindicating the ongoing logic of sacrifice. In Cary Wolfe's formulation, animals maintain an ambivalent status before the law—that is, "before the judgment of a law that is inscrutable not just because it establishes by fiat who falls inside and outside the frame, but also because it disavows its own contingency through violence: namely the violence of sacrifice for which the distinction between human and animal has historically been bedrock."6 While limited protections do of course exist for nonhuman life, Wolfe helps expose a more fundamental disparity between humans and nonhumans in showing how the law has surrendered full responsibility for the lives of animals. As a result, animals do not legally qualify as living creatures, much less as what Judith Butler has termed a "grievable life."7 How else can one explain the 96 percent death rate for canines who served in the Vietnam War, a staggering figure by any lights?8 In the midst of our culture's systemic disregard for nonhuman life—revealed most profoundly in human theaters of war—confronting our monumental impulse may help to challenge a cultural history of wasteful indifference to the environment at large. At stake in our consideration of animal memorials is thus the shaping of cultural memory and imagination. "How we image a thing, true or false," Lawrence Buell famously writes, "affects our conduct toward it, the conduct of nations as well as persons."9 Monumental structures forcibly direct our attention and define patterns of conduct toward nonhuman others. But they are also capable, as Susan Signe Morrison [End Page 87] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. David Backhouse, Animals in War Memorial, London, 2004. Photograph by the author, 2017. proposes in "Waste Aesthetics," of "enabl[ing] culture to acknowledge what it has to deny"—namely, "bodily, cultural, and societal waste."10 Bearing the mark

Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Archaeology · Art · Dismemberment · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Essentialism · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sacrifice · Sociology · Anthropology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy

• The texture of memory

  James Edward Young•The texture of memory•1993

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• The Environmental Imagination

  Open Access•Lawrence Buell•Environmental Imagination•1996

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• Animal Rites

  Cary Wolfe, W J T Mitchell et al.•Animal Rites•2003

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• Terms of the Political

  Renata Esposito, Roberto Esposito et al.•Quaderni d italianistica•2014

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